Going To The Rio Olympics? Avoid These 5 High-Risk Behaviors To Protect Your Plastic And Identity

Dan Reed
, ContributorI write about airlines, the travel biz, and related industriesOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

In today’s world it is pretty much a practical impossibility to travel without a credit card – or multiple cards. But the more cards you take – and the more you use them in Brazil during the upcoming two-week Olympics – the more exposed you’ll be to credit card fraud and related identity theft. That’s according to Andreas Suma, Global Leader of Data and Fraud at ACI Worldwide, a major processor of electronic payments for banks and merchants around the globe.

You see, what Visa used to tell us in their very positive ads – “Everywhere you want to be” – also can be said about credit card fraudsters in deeply-troubled Rio de Janeiro, and all of Brazil. They’re everywhere you want to be.

Brazilians play beach volleyball on Copacabana beach, near the Rio 2016 Olympic Games beach volleyball stadium, on July 24, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

News about Brazil’s chaotic political and economic situation, and about the city’s and the nation’s unpreparedness to host the Olympic Games have been setting off alarm bells in the rest of the world for several years. In the last six months those alarm bells have turned into loud air raid sirens.

Some Olympic venues are struggling to reach completion (a standard story line for all Olympics)

Crime is rampant both in the impoverished shanty town called favelas that are home to more than 1 million people

There’s also been a huge increase in crime over the last couple of years in Rio’s tourist areas and, most especially on Rio’s famed Ipanema and Copacabana beaches

Zika virus-spreading mosquitos and other diseases have many of the athletes – and visitors – taking extra precautions, and some really big name athletes staying home rather than risk their health and lucrative careers

Athletes are being warned against getting into the water at some beaches and fresh water venues. In fact, U.S. sailing and kayaking athletes are planning to wear special suits to protect them from the pervasive human waste contamination

To combat the crime problem in Rio, Brazil is calling in thousands of police officers from around the nation to help, but that may not be enough, and it certainly will make venturing beyond Rio more of a gamble for visitors because police protection there will be minimal

The political and social upheaval going on in Brazil (the president is being impeached amid a years-long political scandal involving her political party) and grinding poverty worsened by Brazil’s steep economic decline get most of the blame.

But if all that wasn’t enough to worry travelers going to the Games, and cause them be hyper-cautious, Brazil’s status as having the second-highest rate of credit fraud in the world, is only going to worse. When huge numbers of foreigners on vacation congregate in one locale it becomes a field day for fraudsters. In the case of Rio, the Olympics promise to be a veritable convention for credit card crooks.

Almost 49 percent of people who live in, or have visited Brazil recently, and who responded to a survey conducted by ACI Worldwide say they have been victimized. Mexico tops the list at a staggering 56%. And the United States is a close third at 47 percent.

But the rate at which instances of credit card fraud has been growing in Brazil is most alarming - it was just 30 percent in 2014. And with hundreds of thousands of foreigners – most of them wealthy by Brazil’s economic standards – expected to converge on Rio in August Rio will become a target-rich environment for all sorts of street thieves and fraudsters

Suma is most concerned with credit card fraud. And he warns that Americans, in particular, are vulnerable to credit card fraud and related identity theft because the United States has been slower than most other developed nations in transitioning to state-of-the-art credit security protocols.

“Most Americans are still reliant on the mag stripe, or a chip but not a chip-and-PIN security level,” he says.